Toys

Blackstar is an American animated television series, a science fantasy story sometimes reported as being inspired by Thundarr the Barbarian. It was produced in 1981 by Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott for Filmation. The series was Filmation’s second fantasy epic, the first being The Freedom Force, a segment of Tarzan and the Super 7. Blackstar has many notable similarities to He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which was produced shortly afterwards.

The A-Team is an American action-adventure television series that ran on NBC from 1983 to 1987 about members of a fictitious former United States Army Special Forces unit. The members, after being court-martialed “for a crime they didn’t commit”, escaped from military prison and, while still on the run, worked as soldiers of fortune. The series was created by Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo. A feature film based on the series was released by 20th Century Fox in June 2010.

BIG TRAK / bigtrak is a programmable electric vehicle created by Milton Bradley in 1979, resembling a futuristic Sci-Fi tank / utility vehicle, possibly for use on the Moon or a Planetoid style environment. The original Big Trak was a six-wheeled (two-wheel drive) tank with a front-mounted blue “photon beam” headlamp, and a keypad on top. The toy could remember up to 16 commands, which it then executed in sequence. There also was an optional cargo trailer accessory, with the U.K. version being white to match its colour scheme; once hooked to the Bigtrak, this trailer could be programmed to dump its payload.

In 2010, BIG TRAK was relaunched in the form of a slightly modified replica (cosmetically very similar to the original U.K. bigtrak), produced under licence by Zeon Ltd. There is also a small dedicated Internet community who have reverse engineered the BIG TRAK and the Texas Instruments TMS1000 microcontroller inside it.

Trivial Pursuit is a board game in which progress is determined by a player’s ability to answer general knowledge and popular culture questions. The game was created in December 1979 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, by Canadian Chris Haney, a photo editor for Montreal’s The Gazette and Scott Abbott, a sports editor for The Canadian Press. After finding pieces of their Scrabble game missing, they decided to create their own game. With the help of John Haney and Ed Werner, they completed development of the game, which was released in 1982. It was designed by Michael Wurstlin.

In North America, the game’s popularity peaked in 1984, a year in which over 20 million games were sold. The rights to the game were initially licensed to Selchow and Righter in 1982, then to Parker Brothers (now part of Hasbro) in 1988, after initially being turned down by the Virgin Group; in 2008, Hasbro bought out the rights in full, for US$80 million. As of 2004, nearly 88 million games had been sold in 26 countries and 17 languages. Northern Plastics of Elroy, Wisconsin produced 30,000,000 games between 1983 and 1985. An online version of Trivial Pursuit was launched in September 2003.

In 1792, Henry Walton Smith and his wife Anna established the business as a news vendor in Little Grosvenor Street, London. After their deaths, the business — valued in 1812 at £1,280 —(about ~63764 in 2012, adjusted by inflation) was taken over by their youngest son William Henry Smith, and in 1846 the firm became W H Smith & Sonwhen his only son, also William Henry, became a partner. The firm took advantage of the railway boom by opening newsstands on railway stations, starting with Euston in 1848. In 1850 the firm opened depots in Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool. The younger W H Smith used the success of the firm as a springboard into politics, becoming an MP in 1868 and serving as a minister in several Conservative governments.